THE LAST STEP Breakthrough

“I always lost track of past events, even before my death,” says the deceased protagonist of Ali Mosaffa’s THE LAST STEP, inviting us down the rabbit hole of this playful puzzle of a film. The narrator is Koshrow (Mosaffa), a depressed architect who has just died in a mysterious fall. Mosaffa peels away the layers of the story to explore Koshrow’s mercurial marriage to Leili, a successful and independent actress, played by Mossafa’s real-life wife (Leila Hatami from A SEPARATION). The story is complicated by the arrival of Amin, a mysterious doctor seeking a part in Leili’s next film.  Drawing inspiration from Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Joyce’s “The Dead” and its self-referential setting inside the Iranian film community, THE LAST STEP is an elegantly constructed and intellectually rewarding film. Its non-linear narrative freely shuffles points-of-view to explore the nature of memory, cinema and storytelling.